The mythical Late 298 - The French Torpedo bomber that never shot a torpedo in anger (there is a very good reason for that - not any French plane ever shot a torpedo in anger. The DA26 torpedo itself was excellent, sturdy and reliable, but the fuze...well its fuze suffered from a strange tendency to ....spontaneously activate when the safety catch was pulled when dropping the torpedo. So dropping a French live torpedo was a kind of Russian Roulette and French Aeronavale crews used to fly with fuzes with a safety that could be taken out only by the ground crews or with dummy torpedoes - as a matter of fact all the photographs of Late298 show it with dummy torpedo fuzes, and not with the war fuze with its characteristic prongs. Well for the sake of the game here the fuze has the looks of a dummy fuze (I'll make a mesh for the real fuze at a later time) but works smoothly, so you cant take shoots at some boats.)
If it was not enough, the main operational use made with this seaplane was....over the desert (well, you need to understand French mind, and more than that French military mind) against...the British and Australian forces in the campaign for Syria and Lebanon, as semi-dive bombers. Their single tentative to bomb the British Fleet covering the operations was not really encouraging....
BUT it was a very good plane for its period (mid thirties) and even for the early forties, though under armed for ww2 war conditions, and a beautiful plane.....
So here it is - still some upgrades are in the channel (Epervier sent me some java titbits that I did not yet introduce, I need to add the torpedo sight, and modify the opening of the pilot cockpit (unique to this plane)
The skin is by Leperemagloire
Initially I tried to use a model of Baldy (Mike Fielden), a very talented modder of CFS2 who has very kindly authorized me to use hsi models for import in Il2, but this model of the Late298 was problematic (Baldy has since then updloaded a much corrected model) so IU had to remake most of the meshes from the plans.
You'll need my news French bomb pack for this plane
https://www.mediafire.com/file/uoq2dykiucptxz0/_Arms_French_1918_1943.7z/fileand these files too
https://www.mediafire.com/file/q0rycxpqvqgodse/!Interwar+French+Machine+Guns.7z/filehttps://www.mediafire.com/file/lppb53xhy48ujer/!French+Torpedo+and+Racks.7z/fileThe link for the plane
https://www.mediafire.com/file/znmikd8u6xf2h7z/Late298+v3.0.7z/fileAir.ini addition:
LATE_298 air.LATE_298 1 NOINFO f01 SUMMER
Feel free to finalize and upgrade this plane where needed.
Enjoy
The plane has been tested in 4.122 modact 5.30, so will probably run smoothly also in BAT
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Topic: Late 298 (Read 4522 times)
